The most important factor for financial time series forecasting is undoubtedly access to clean data. This is what sets Renaissance apart. There’s no need for particularly sophisticated math - they’ve been doing it for 3 decades.
It drives me nuts when I see words like "undoubtedly" thrown around so confidently this way. A new book comes out about Simons and Renaissance, it enters the financial zeitgeist for a little while, and now everyone is apparently an expert on the firm's differentiating competency.
For what it's worth, what you're saying is contradicted by Nick Patterson. He did not say that Renaissance had access to clean data no one else did. What he said is that in the early days, they spent almost all their time cleaning the data. In any case, that's table stakes these days. All successful quant firms spend time sourcing exceptional data and ensuring it's as polished as possible.
I see this very often on Reddit and here; someone reads a story and then behaves like they're suddenly a prophet whose job it is to inform the rest of us. On Reddit (because the threads are much bigger) I see this kind of repetition promulgation in the same thread. Here it's typically across threads (as you've noticed). I'll never understand what people get out seeming like an authority figure in a completely anonymous forum.
Market data services such as Reuters/Morning Star provide incredibly clean data at great convenience for anything you can imagine, even including astronomical data.
Its kind of like the Black-Scholes model. If it really was that simple and straightforward, everybody would be using it to make a ton of money.
Incredibly clean ,that's a very big stretch.
Source: have worked with TR sirca db for almost a decade.
Founded by Jim Simons, the "Father" of quantitative research. The firm is famous for their significant year-over-year returns and notorious for only hiring PhDs from mathematics/physics/computer science.
There is an interesting book on how Jim Simons created the company and built his team of academics from the ground up, "The Man Who Solved the Market"
I don't understand why I was downvoted? I don't think there was enough context for anyone (who's not in the field) to know what you meant, and I thought it would be useful for people like myself to get clued in.